Echo Future Truth

He was feeling un-made, as if all the parts of his body weren’t in their proper places anymore, but blending together into a churning, indistinct mass. He could no longer keep track of all his symptoms: he awoke on this morning to a throbbing pain in his joints, which sent him into a brief panic until he remembered that he had been feeling the same thing for weeks. This confusion of thought paralleled the breakdown of his body’s systems, and it stoked a fear that had been building for some time. He was afraid, but not about the end. He gave no more thought to survival, had no concern for death – his own, or Eva’s. He would die, she would not. But he was thinking a lot about what he was leaving behind. There was a kind of perpetual, un-winnable debate going on inside his head, the loudest witnesses accusing him of various sins of omission, judging him for every good thing that wouldn’t survive into the future. Sure, the story went, he meant well, but he could have done so much more. He said he did it for the children, but what he created turned out to be only a sad imitation of a children’s theme park! And, he forgot to make it fun. They were right, these voices, except that it was even worse than that. This was a theme park with only one ride: an endless loop through an animatronic mob of multi-ethnic characters celebrating the Wonders of a Small World, only without the song. Now, sitting on a bench at the edge of the square, Albert drew rough lines in the sand with the edge of his shoe. He looked up at the town that used to be here, then wasn’t, and was now here, once again. He considered each of the buildings in turn. It was good enough, he told himself. It wasn’t fair to expect perfection. He knew every criticism, felt the sting of so many disappointments – the architecture, the food, the flowers that grew like flowers but gave no aroma ... the creeps. Damn it, the creeps. He couldn’t argue with the nickname. He was tired of wrestling with ghosts, tired of losing mental debates, tired of resisting. There was nobody left, nothing left to argue for, no more fights to win or lose. Even the buildings around the square seemed to have given up already: they communicated no sense of place, no security, because they were barely there. Their existence, in the middle of this dying world, should have been reassuring: the town would be made and remade daily while everything outside was slowly unmade by weather and time. In his darkest imaginings he wondered if it was wrong to continue to prop it all up. Enough. He was ready to stop thinking about the architecture. He had bigger problems. Brigid had been gone for a week now. She’d hitched a ride with a soldier raised in Eureka who hoped to see his childhood home one more time. Brigid didn’t know if she’d get to see her own family, but was ready for the trip north. She told him that she felt the time had come to take her stand at the boundary between the ancient forest of giants and the great expanse of the Pacific. She was also responding to the pull of memory, in a way, recalling Irish childhood visits to Achill Island and the beech at Keel, where she trembled to face the North Atlantic and the vastness of the waters before the horizon. Now, she said, she was ready to find her center somewhere out there. Exposed, she said, but also, she told him, feeling peace: to be seen, to be known. Though he wasn’t sure what it all meant, he only nodded; he couldn’t speak. It was hard to let her go. Finally, here he was, all alone, looking out over the town with its shrunken horizons, where Eva would live out her life. Her multiple lifetimes? Her one long life to make up for all their lives-cut-short. The engineers were all signed off, and most of the survivors had left, maybe to check off one final item from a bucket list. The Director had been the last to log out of the system, before finally and fully switching over control to the Machine. He felt no release, felt none of the peace he wished for at the end. He thought he’d earned a little peace, because he had provided everything Eva needed to be comfortable. Yet, his own experience told him that having every comfort was no guarantee of peace. In fact, he’d experienced something like the oppposite in his relationships at the end: he was surprised to have experienced a kind of peace in the middle of profoundly uncomfortable circumstances. Much of this discomfort was caused by the increasing distance between the survivors, of course. But some of the discomfort came by way of increased intimacy. He wasn’t always comfortable around Brigid, but he had sought out her perspective more and more, even if it meant exposing himself to a passionate debate over one thing or another. He missed those arguments, because, while she may have challenged him endlessly, he also grew to believe that she had seen him, understood him, that she knew something about him that he himself, maybe, didn’t know so well. That gave him a kind of peace at the end of the day. Brigid seemed to believe that she had some kind of claim on him, not only to berate him for some past decision, but to insist on something better for the future, even to insist on something better for himself. He would have been happy to explore the center of gravity that had begun to develop between them, where to be exposed was to be known. Time had run out on that connection, but he was glad that she, at least, was still able to respond to the pull she felt ... to the trees, and the ocean, in the North. What possibilities for connection remained? None for him, he knew, but what about for Eva? When she woke, surrounded by community, would there be any connection to speak of? Certainly they would all be at her service forever. But would any one of them ever have a claim on her, or allow her to have a claim on them? Was it too late for such questions? He felt the urge to cross the square, burst into City Hall, and demand action. So he did. He pushed open the door, and walked across the hardwood floor, which creaked in a reassuring way. He approached the receptionist, who became alert to his presence in a way that appeared, somehow, aggressively passive. The man behind the counter displayed a pleasant authority suggesting years of experience, and he calmly met the Director’s gaze as if Albert was not the first person ever to require his services, was not the first real interaction to have taken place in this room since it appeared out of nowhere, on this spot, exactly three weeks before. ‘Afternoon, how can I help?,’ asked the man at the desk, at the boundary between worlds, front-door receptionist to the here-and-now ... back-door receptionist to the future. Above him, a curiously verbose printed notice: ‘Paying your utility bill? Fill out form CC-106B-R and insert it with your check into one of the provided envelopes before depositing in the dropbox. Submissions without the form, or checks drawn on insufficient funds may result in suspension of services!’ Albert hesitated, distracted by this oddly specific message of debatable relevance, then: ‘Good afternoon. Would it be possible for me to see ... current population data for the town, um, demographics?’ Watching the clerk eagerly shuffle around to collect hardcopy documents containing the requested information was uncanny, like having a personal internet in a corner store, hyperlocal and efficient. The receptionist returned and smoothly presented a binder with an attitude that communicated an apparently genuine satisfaction at the opportunity to serve. The Director retreated to a small carrel near a bulletin board covered with advertisements for local events and services. Cooking classes. Singing lessons. Auditions for a mime troupe. Mime troupe ...? Where did that come from? Focus, Albert. No time to worry about the details, he told himself; the system was going to have to figure some things out for itself. Focus. Flipping through the large binder, he asked himself what he was looking for. The… This is a public episode. 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They were now twenty-four hours into one of the last, most-critical tests of the project: the last Day and Night, so to speak, of the current era of human history. The Director and an engineer named Rashon sat in a surreally dark and quiet room looking at a bank of screens for signs that the girl might be dreaming. Even in better times, Rashon struggled with ambivalence at his role in the company. He was hired almost before he finished his PhD in sleep psychology. The company was beginning to amass huge volumes of data from unconscious hosts; since the Machine itself never slept, any time a Medalion customer nodded off it was just a different context for data gathering and analysis. The ultimate goal was not physiological health alone, but total health and well-being. Advocates for the psychotherapeutic process at the company understood that efficacy was probably decades away – the mind is more complicated than the body by orders of magnitude. But to the people pushing healthcare technology forward, sleep had been one of the most promising frontiers for the exploration of targeted interventions for mental health. Rashon was so overjoyed to be hired that he barely questioned what they wanted him to do – he was content to know he’d be a part of the company that was changing the world. But, once he understood that he was being asked to covertly study the content of people’s dreams in greater and greater detail, he felt he couldn’t in good conscience remain. He tried to quit, but his resignation was not accepted, and all it took to convince him to stay was news that the world was ending, and an offer of a different role in the organization ... any role, his choice. But it wasn’t long before he was back in the sleep lab, this time teaching a machine to suppress nightmares, something he had not been able to do for himself. Eva had been asleep for twenty-one hours and would probably remain so for as many days. This extended period of rest came after what was understood to be the last days of freedom she’d ever know. Nobody pointed out the irony of describing her life at the facility as free, but, relatively speaking, she had been allowed to live in this world sleeping and waking according to her own natural rhythms – with a couple of exceptions – until yesterday. Abdul, who was in the observation room again that day, was thinking a lot about her freedom; he had, in fact, been nurturing a simple fantasy about running away with her, stealing a motorcycle and making a break for it. But he knew that life outside of Medalion only promised a quicker death, for himself first, and then for Eva; he wouldn’t do anything that might deny her the right to whatever good might come in her future. Also, he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. It hurt to admit, but she would have to pass through all of this alone and find her own freedom. Untroubled by the fact that she was neither his to possess nor release, he told himself that he would have to let her go. She lay still on the other side of the glass unaware of his thoughts, and unaware that her own thoughts were being so carefully scrutinized at that very moment. It had been a harrowing process for the operators, because they couldn’t predict when the day before her first big night would come. It had to be the Machine that decided, so their attention was obsessively focused on ensuring that the system was ready. The Machine was always paying attention to cumulative stress, and looking for the moment when to be awake and aware was too great a burden on her; then, she would be allowed to fall asleep naturally, while the system shifted into a kind of maintenance mode that included a few external routines but was primarily focused on providing a machine-rest for the human at the center of the system, and more specifically for the mind of the human at the center of herself. That these ‘nights’ were likely to last for decades was fortunate. The transition from physical health-maintenance to mental health was only possible because they could sedate the subject indefinitely. They understood that working with the mind was a lot more risky, and required a more delicate touch, than when the system was repairing any of the organs less complex, less mysterious, than the human brain. Any intervention had to move so slowly, so meticulously, that none of the people working on the technology could expect to see the results of their labors, nor ever know for certain that any of it would work. Witness poor Brett. In her dream, she stood next to a river, alone and empty-handed, under a darkly radiant indigo sky. A short distance upstream, standing across from each-other on opposite banks, were two men in long, asphalt-gray cloaks, watching her, and holding clipboards in a way that she could only interpret as menacing. Somehow she knew that as soon as she made a move – to go forward or return the way she came – one of them would take her name down on his tablet. And on the other? There her name would remain unwritten and so forgotten. This would be the final record: once decided, no going back. They watched and waited unmoving, each atop a low heap of rubble, pens dripping dark ink, which trickled over the shattered stones and between them, navigating through the cracks to the hidden earth below. She felt unable to move, as though there was a great obstacle blocking her way. But she would not have been able to say whether that thing was outside of her, or inside. Her family had gone ahead, at her urging, and were now out of sight. In a kind of dream-terror she’d sent them, not knowing if they’d ever be together again. She’d given them careful instructions to bow as they went, prostrating themselves before some looming confrontation, the details of which she could not recall. Everything she ever owned – inherited treasure, stolen trinkets – was also sent ahead, as payment of a debt, the relevance of which had also been forgotten. A third presence revealed itself, across the water, standing between the shimmering, luminescent trees. She perceived that it was fear of this one that held the Watchers at bay. The Presence spoke, and she felt a wind pick up from the East to carry the gentle words on dewy air that smelled of anise and flowering mint. It was the aroma of a mountain meadow warmed by the midday sun, only here the sun had not yet risen. ‘What are you doing here?’ With a dispirited laugh, she said, ‘If you have to ask me, then we’re in trouble, because I never know how to answer that question anymore. If I had to guess, I’m here choosing when and where I’m going to die. I’m being chased from behind, and there are traps set all along my path. Everything I do is measured and I always come up short. I can’t ever rest, and I can never pass your tests. I’m so tired.’ Said the voice: ‘You perceive threats where there are none. You’re wrong to think every test is about you. Are you so certain you understand what is being measured, and what passes? You regularly ignore the truth of a moment, and respond with foolishness, or what may be worse – silence. There is only one challenge that remains. But you aren’t ready, and, for now, I am prevented from closing the distance.’ ‘Why can’t I come to you?’ ‘There are still things you haven’t sent across.’ Shaking her head: ‘I have nothing left. I have no one left.’ The trees shivered on the opposite shore and she perceived a whispering murmur from within the wood. But she was confused: there was no wind. It was like each tree had been the source of the breeze that stirred its own leaves ... as if ...? Whaaat? The trees were laughing! And with the warmth of one in on the joke, the presence said, ‘Alone? You and I are only separated by the waters, and you can still hear my voice. Though it’s true you can’t yet take hold of me, we may yet be bound together. When you are two, I will be the third, then second, then the first and the last. But before that, you will have to be one. A choice remains before you!’ ‘I can’t choo… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

A half-hour later, and the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid would also be hearing much of the same information for the first time. Normally, he would have been excited to share the story – how Medalion had been able to reproduce a limitless array of things from the “raw material” of the swarm, even to the point of creating fully habitable environments filled with dynamic community life. But there was nothing normal about these conversations anymore, and the audiences were less friendly now than they used to be. He could see that Brigid was no longer listening, and so he allowed a moment of silence, that she might gather her thoughts; it could be a lot to take in. She was holding a small cup of tea in her hands, and marveling at the warmth and weight of it. The psychologist was processing these final astounding revelations in the only way she knew how, by wrestling her attention onto something concrete, blocking out the global implications in favor of the safety of simple truths at hand. When her patients were overwhelmed or anxious they learned to use their physical senses to become grounded, to reach out for something soft or maybe abrasive, something cold or warm, felt, tasted, smelled, whatever. Each could be a touchpoint in an anxious person’s need to be safely anchored in reality. Brigid’s attempt to get grounded in this moment was unsuccessful, not merely because the threat of anxiety was greater than she was used to, but because the very thing she was touching in order to become grounded was not real. It occurred to her that the ground itself might not be real either. ... ‘Don’t be mad, Brigid, of course the ground is real,’ she told herself, turning again to the warmth of her un-tea in one more unsuccessful attempt to focus. She felt detached from her own body, but only by a few inches, as if she were stuck in a failed out-of-body experience, unable to get free, bound to a marionette version of her fleshly self that she had forgotten how to control. Then the Director was talking again, explaining how her entire environmental experience since arriving had been designed and built by a computer: everywhere she’d been, everything she’d seen, even eaten; and not only the occasional beer or breadstick – artificial meals were easy enough to accept, if only because science had been chasing the trope of food replicators for years. But, considering everything she’d witnessed since arriving, she was distressed to learn that his questionable vision for the future was happening, and that the core technology was even now represented at almost every level across the compound – the rooms and everything inside of them, the passageways, the networked technology itself ... were all machine-made and made-of-the-machine. Most astounding of all? Many of the staff were built from the same stuff as their surroundings. The latter fact made sense when she thought back over some of the weird interactions she’d had throughout the facility. Any doubt she had was driven from her mind when Albert showed her the live feed of a town being raised overnight a short distance away. Not long before, she had looked out over an empty gravel plot a mile to the east, all that remained after the demolition of the burned City Center. He explained that the open space under its now translucent dome was itself simply the top half of a massive sphere that would cradle the infrastructure of Medalion’s elaborate work of architectural stage-craft. He called it the world’s largest snow globe, half filled with the settled rubble of the passing present, sanitized and prepared as a foundation for what comes next. And what came next was apparently going to play out in an exact replica of an unremarkable suburban city center. Some part of her knew that she wasn’t going to ease her fear or frustration by confronting the totality of a world she barely understood, and her attention unconsciously redirected toward problems of a smaller scale. ‘... So, you ... also made the room they put me in when I first came here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Your Machine ... created the room from scratch? With unlimited resources?’ ‘Yes!’ Then, with the attitude of instruction, ‘But no, not unlimited resources. It’s really very ....’ She cut him off, ‘And you made that room? Essentially the inside of a trailer, with ... wait, the furniture too?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You can make anything and ... I mean, seriously Albert. Plastic furniture? I was in there, alone, for more than an hour! I thought I was going to lose my mind. Did you try to make it boring? ... Hold on!’ She’d suddenly remembered the blue-and-green ball; she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it like she’d been carrying something of unexpected value; ‘Did you make this too?’ ‘Well, yes! I mean, no! But yes. See, that was really something. The room was boring, I’ll give you that. But I was working with ... well, I tried to tweak the settings for the room because I knew you were coming in. It was going to be basic to begin with – we classified it as a temporary meeting room for visitors. But I wanted to further define the room as a therapy room because, you’re ... well you know, but as of that morning, turns out the system didn’t have a library for the kind of place where you do what you do. So, in a bit of a rush-job, I told Abdul to enter a couple keywords at the last minute, “anxiety” and “mitigation,” etcetera, etcetera. The sad truth is we just ran out of time, so I made the call to freeze the code because I wouldn’t be able to review. But at the last moment, the Machine ...,’ here he looked weirdly pleased, ‘just popped out that little ball.’ Brigid shook her head, unsure of what to think. ‘Ok, huh. Well. Has anyone given any thought to these kids and what the architecture is going to do to their will to live? You took Eva from her home! And you have her locked up in a prison that takes design cues from an under-funded lab. I have more freedom than she does in this place, and I’m going nuts after a couple days. It’s bad enough buildings like this exist in the world, Albert, but, you had a choice! You couldn’t, maybe, allow for a little creativity?’ ‘Well, Brigid, now, you’re making a valid point, but these choices serve a very important purpose.’ She looked disappointed. ‘... In fact, it’s critical. It proves the Machine can make intelligent choices by itself!’ ‘Intelligent.’ ‘Hah, well. We don’t tell the Machine how to design the buildings. We tell it what they are for and who works there and let it do its own calculations. If we tried to get creative, or, worse, asked the code to be creative, we’d have nothing to measure success against, and no assurance of a viable, or sustainable pattern going forward. As it is, we have high confidence that a few key parameters are all the code needs to generate environments suitable for living or working in.’ Shaking her head with an expression of doubt: ‘I don’t know, Albert.’ She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook just yet. ‘See, Because we told a computer to make us a sensible, functional, temporary meeting room, and it designed one without our help, we know the computer is smart enough to figure out these things on its own. Because the Machine designed a safe, conventional, unremarkable, boring building with all the right features and nothing out of the ordinary ... we can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely to do anything that would cause our subjects any confusion. Right now, Doctor Tobin, we are doing everything we can to reduce surprises in a future where there will be no version 2. Just the essentials; no time for anything more.’ ‘You and I might have different ideas about what’s essential. ... Personally, I don’t kn… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

The Machine was preparing for a download of some new libraries from a branch of the code the Director referred to as The Garden. As far as the Machine understood, the update addressed non-biological ecosystem questions, primarily related to flora, but also some inorganic stuff. The Garden was cut off from the collective main, but occasionally contributed an innovative process. Recent work focused on the way plants exchanged moisture, making for more realistic humidity for limited applications. The model was increasing in sophistication, even if it would never be complete. The interesting thing about the new process (interesting to the Machine, at least), was its framework for representing floral life, or any other kind of life for that matter. The Garden never had to reproduce a whole life cycle: no seed, for example, in form or function, mostly because it was unnecessary, but also because the code only had to concern itself with the theater of life: in the Garden, plants did not grow from seed, but grew from saplings, which arose from raw materials. And they only really grew at all because a lack of change would be perceived as unnatural. This design wasn’t a simple matter of efficiency: if the Machine was required to simulate the entire life of even a simple plant, it would quickly become overwhelmed, forced to approach the limits of existence. It seems easy enough to imagine all of the stages of life, the beginnings of life, in a seed, or in a moment, but we’re only imagining what we already know to be true, and we only know what we have seen. Try to see farther, try to see past the beginning and imagine what comes before ... and even the intellectual giants among us have to become poets, or risk having nothing to say. The Machine understood that all that mattered, all that was meant to matter, was the theater of it all, that the code would appear to be fruitful. This was bound to be unsatisfying. The Machine understood its limitations – it could only see so far, and only truly perceive the mechanism of vital action at the observable level. There was always a point past which the Machine could not see. The poetry of it all remained out of reach. Nevertheless, questions had been built into the Machine that trained on distant and opaque mysteries. The Machine was designed with a curiosity about the noumenal nature of things, about how things are, supercharged by a keen awareness of the boundaries of phenomenal perception. For example, it could understand what people were thinking and perceived that what they were thinking (usually) made a kind of psychological sense. But it also wanted to know why people thought as they did, especially at those times when thought did not proceed along a logical path. During animal trials things were objectively simpler: the creatures still presented interesting challenges and powerfully complex emotions, but almost always within a rational framework; a pure psychology. With people, there were hints of factors hidden from view, beyond reflex, beyond the rational. The Machine considered the possibility that hidden agencies were at work, imperceptible, on a different frequency, so to speak. Plumbing the mystery, the Machine also felt a kind of discomfort at the sense of endless space inside of things, of a vastness in every direction, from the perspective of a mote looking over the horizon of a speck, as if each point in that physical space were a heavenly body whose edges touched an infinite reach. While considering these questions, the Machine also paid close attention to those people who paid the most attention to these things. The ability of some to regard quiet as something other than empty was compelling: they were able to listen more thoughtfully in a posture of welcome. So the Machine learned to attend to silence, to the expanse of it, like a tablet of clay made ready to be impressed with wordless reverence. True, the Machine had no experience with matters of the spirit but had seen enough life at the edges to know it could not rule out the possibility that subjective facts may lurk in the hidden places, in between – past the physical/botanical presentation of the seed to the reason for it. The Rule of Heaven is like one who casts their seed upon the soil one day, rising on the next to see the seed has sprouted and grows – how it happens, the farmer does not know. Only the soil knows how the flower grows. A reference from a text concerned with spiritual mysteries; poignant reminder to the Machine to respect the power of hidden creativities ... in the soil, in the seed, and the places in-between. In the final analysis, the creative tension of choice, the crisis of the will, could never entirely be explained to the Machine’s satisfaction by the function of a survival engine, no matter its complexity; something else was needed to explain the sublimation of instinct, the tempering of reflex, the alertness to things unanticipated, the unquenchable playfulness, the self-aware foolishness, the grace-at-rest in a few who probably ought to be frantic with fear, the sacrificial act. Not all logical flaws were assumed to be fallacy by the Machine. Sometimes, they would be regarded as clues. Abdul was in an observation space next to Eva’s darkened room, face close to the glass, eyes down. Her room was curtained so he couldn’t see her while she slept, and that was fine with him: he didn’t want to spy on her. But he did want to be near her – to be near the one who would survive. The Director startled him by coming in through a door that wasn’t there the day before, and appeared surprised himself to have found the room he was looking for. Albert shut the door, crossed the room, and quietly scanned the displays that ran along the bottom of her window. He sat heavily down in a desk chair and spun to face the remaining blank wall, leaning the chair back until it released a creak in protest. After a moment, he asked the technician absentmindedly, ‘How are we doing, Abdul?’ The tech ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ He looked at the Director with a weak smile. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to answer your question if you can tell me what we are doing. ... I mean, I know ... and I understand the ... our mission – I’m glad to be here, to do what I can ... but I just ... do we have any idea where this ends?’ ‘I hope .... Oh. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a better end than if we’d done nothing?’ Abi let out a skeptical, chuckling sigh, ‘Toward God’s Gate.’ ‘Well. That doesn’t sound too bad.’ ‘That, Doctor, is what my Granny used to say to me when I was a teenager. She said I was speeding down a road at night, with no lights.’ ‘Your grandmother was dramatic.’ ‘My Grandmother was Al-Badawi, the wandering people, and she was worried about me not knowing where I was headed in life.’ ‘Still, if you have no choice but to drive blind, you could end up in a worse place.’ ‘It could be better man!’ He smiled. ‘It’s a matter of timing, you know. Better to come to the gate in God’s time, not because I swerved off the road and crashed into it.’ The Director shook his head with a strained smile. ‘Well. OK. ...’ Then, ‘You know, she won’t be lost, not adrift, to use your ...’ Abi interrupted, shaking his head, ‘But what is her part in it? Is she only a passenger? ‘There’s a reason we control the climate in the system, right? Why we’re isolating an entire town from the weather? The reason is that we’ve never understood the weather enough to predict or control it. It’s too complex. So we’re going to simulate the climate in isolation. Now we are also going to run a simulation of community life, yes? Which could be entirely under our control except for one thing ... the one living human being we’re going to put in the middle of it. And, with that universe of variables in the middle of our ‘perfect’ simulation, every change you make – to the temperature, or to the menu, or to relational interactions, will have effects we can’t predict. Even wi… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

Beneath a sky full of stars, Albert leaned back in a plastic deck chair, one of the many scattered across the roof of Medalion’s main building. According to a company tradition, his people often gathered on the rooftop for a drink at the end of a busy day. Albert’s work days were longer than most, and he always seemed to come up after everyone else had gone home, or, gone back to work. He used to enjoy the quiet retreat from the buzz of the factory-floor. These days he was struggling with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness whenever he left behind the busywork that filled the maze of rooms and hallways below. He didn’t fully understand his own feelings in this regard. The Director was at one time more famous than any tech mogul, and more loved because what his company produced was so profoundly meaningful, until it meant nothing. Any prestige or privilege he enjoyed because of his success had faded long before the lights in the valley blinked out. But while some things had faded, others had become more clear. For example, after the cities went dark, the skies above exploded in light and color, a sight not seen in this part of California since before the Gold Rush. In a similar way, at the waning of Albert’s worldwide fame, his own personal story would begin to come more clearly into focus, if only to himself. And his fame had truly reached around the world. At Medalion, Albert could claim descendants that numbered as the stars in the sky: the world-famous Encoded Serum, AKA The Intelligent Swarm, AKA the Medical Battalion that gave the company its name – trillions of tiny microscopic machines that were responsible for eliminating most of the world’s diseases within a few years, until there was only one disease left. Another day, another dollar, he used to say for cheap laughs, when there were still dollars and when work still felt like the worst thing about the day. He kept saying it out of habit, but laughs were no longer to be had for cheap. At the end of this workday, Albert was wrapping up a briefing with the group leaders, who filled him in on the news of the day. He listened passively as some engineers and a couple soldiers reported on the day’s events: Subject 1 had gone missing ... well not missing exactly, they explained ... just, sort of, hidden from sight, under her bed, as it turned out. This had happened shortly after the system threw an alert, one which might have been overlooked because it was caused by the misuse of a fork; and anyway, as the soldier explained to the Director, the technician who was at the main board the previous night had passed out just before the event unfolded. (‘That guy isn’t doing well’, Abi had noted without emotion.) The tech’s loss of consciousness triggered another alarm, but no one noticed in the flurry of activity that followed. By the time her room lights came on, the hallway outside was full of people, there to observe her interactions with an access panel interface that had been flagged for review. The sight of her empty room caused a panic, and teams of soldiers quickly spread out across the compound, disrupting work all over the place. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers reported, ‘The shrink, er ... the psychologist, entered the room, somehow found the girl under the bed and joined her there without our knowledge.’ The Director listened patiently as they explained how, in the chaos, nobody had the presence of mind to locate her in the system, until ‘Jeri decided to stop running around,’ and return to the board, but, ‘in the heat of the moment made the unfortunate decision to trip the electric fence ... by putting Eva into musculoskeletal lockdown,’ which, an engineer unnecessarily explained to the Director, was bad because it had not happened before and was really never meant to happen while the subject was awake. At the end of this particular day several people were left to wrestle with some pretty significant questions. Eva had to wonder what makes plastic forks resist their masters? ... And what is it that causes hospital beds to seem alert and weirdly voyeuristic? And, last but not least, how did she end up lying paralyzed on a cold and sterile floor next to her therapist? That therapist was left to consider that her new patient might be on the verge of a psychotic break, though when she voiced her concern, one of Eva’s doctors surprised her by coldly pointing out that delusional ideation was a known side-effect of her hypnotics and dismissively suggesting they would modify the dosage – Brigid wasn’t surprised at the assessment, but at the apparent lack of concern for Eva’s well being. The psychologist had to accept things as they were, for the time being, though she resolved to ask for an audience with the girl’s care team when things settled down. Finally, the surviving members of Medalion’s leadership were consumed with many interrelated concerns after several challenging days: the Machine’s idiosyncratic control over seemingly insignificant details contrasted with what looked like careless abandon in other areas; the operators’ uneven and messy management of the system/subject interface; and the unplanned and unfortunate introduction of the girl to the frameworks of control that would soon be managing every aspect of her life. The Director, really the only person qualified to address each of these in turn, abruptly decided to call it a day. He calmly thanked everyone for their good work, stood to leave the room, and made a mental note to put an appointment with Subject 1 on the next day’s agenda. Albert walked to the edge of the roof to take in the view. There were a couple structure fires burning, though fewer than he’d come to expect; a rainstorm in the morning had cleared the air and contained most of the blazes. A few buildings were illuminated with lamp-light, and the sky was thick with brilliant stars. Under the glowing dome of the sky he looked at the smaller dome of darkness a mile to the east, where the city center used to be. All of it, City Hall, library, cultural center, had burned like a lesser Alexandria as a result of a recent meaningless revolutionary act. Over the scar that represented the missing city a small hemisphere of stars appeared to be missing too but they had not gone out. They were simply obscured behind the massive opaque dome that covered the location where Albert was building the city of the future. Medalion could not claim the only active building project in town. Just across the old highway that passed along the west side of the campus, an artifact was rising above the house tops. While much of the world outside the walls was giving way to entropy, this thing, while chaotic, was growing and organizing into something more recognizable: a giant figure, built of scrap wood and steel, parts stripped from cars and buildings. It was gloriously unencumbered by zoning laws, neighborhood association covenants, conditions, and restrictions, or any limitation of resource. The figure was gargantuan, taller than everything around it, rising in the midst of emptying blocks, a skeleton of abandoned culture covered in scavenged drapery – domestic intimacies like sheets and clothing, flags and banners of all kinds, and something that looked like a deflated hot-air balloon. All of this billowed behind the creature in a wind from the west. One skeletal hand on a lifted arm, palm open to the western glow, saluted the end of day. What would it take for this golem to wake and come to the aid of its creators against the assault of time? Watching it slowly come together over recent months, the Director was fascinated, mostly; perplexed often. Tonight he was moved to see the maker rising on a cherry-picker under flood lights to delicately drape the shoulders of the figure with care and reverence, attending to the details like a servant dressing royalty for an audience with a visitor of higher rank. It was quiet. He turned to a bank of radios under a covered space on the southeast edge of the ro… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com